


In Paris

by SimplerontheInside



Category: The Originals (TV), The Vampire Diaries & Related Fandoms, The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: F/M, Fix-It, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-02
Updated: 2018-08-02
Packaged: 2019-06-20 13:36:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,632
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15535413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SimplerontheInside/pseuds/SimplerontheInside
Summary: Klaus is in Paris with Caroline Forbes.A fix-it of sorts. Because face it, this is how it was always supposed to end.





	In Paris

**Author's Note:**

> Elijah dies to save Hope, and gets his happy ending with Haley in the afterlife. Klaus is left to recover from the loss, with the help of a certain baby vampire.
> 
> Full disclosure, I haven't seen more than one season of The Originals and this was written in an hour as catharsis after scrolling through tumblr and getting sad about how the finale apparently went down. So here's an attempt at a fix it. Hope you enjoy loves.

Klaus is in Paris with Caroline Forbes.

He hadn’t gone right away. There had been bodies to bury, humans to compel, a town left burnt and broken to rebuild in the wake of the final battle against those who sought to destroy his family.

Elijah was gone. Hope told him that his brother was happy, claimed that she dreamed of her Uncle and her Mother, dancing together in a moonlit meadow, laughing together just beyond the veil.

Klaus had patched up the gaping hole opening up inside his chest and decided to believe her. He’d taken his sister and his remaining brothers, helped his daughter bury her Uncle’s ashes beside her mother’s in a field filled with sunshine, unmarked graves their enemies will never find.

He gives Elijah eternal rest. Peace. His brother deserves it.

And when the last of those who have challenged him are nothing but dust in the wind, their ashes spread across scorched earth, he decides to find the pretty blonde who once told him she liked the idea of being chased. Liked the idea of him.

A few centuries, she’d said. There was no better time to start than now.

He finds her in London, blonde hair shining in the weak sun, a burst of golden light among grey streets slick with mist and rain. For a moment when their eyes catch across the square he thinks she’ll run, vanish into the crowd of tourists and safe anonymity the second she smells the blood on his hands, soaked as they are. Fears that perhaps he’s fallen to far, too much the villain now for her to enjoy the chase.

And he would chase her. Will chase her, for as long as she likes. For as long as it takes for her to be his. He’d meant those words when he promised them long ago, to a baby vampire who barely knew her place in the world. It’s a promise written in his bones, an essential part of his being. 

But the grey-wet-cold of this city has soaked into his bones as well, and for the first time in centuries, he feels cold. Tired.

Caroline doesn’t run. She crosses the square instead, heels clicking over cobbles, a drop of golden sunlight enveloping him in her glow. And when she takes his hand Klaus swears it warms, just a touch.

“You’re late,” she whispers, tucking her arm through his, “I thought I was going to have to drink alone.”

“You want a drink?”

She looks at him with the softest expression, the tiniest of smiles tugging at her lips, and he feels the hole deep in his heart opening up again, threatening to swallow him whole. It’s been a long time since anyone looked at Klaus with anything like sympathy.

“That’s our thing, isn’t it?” she says, pulling him from his grief as easily as the sun slips free of a cloud, “Come on, I know a nice place just down the road. You’ll love it.”

She pulls at his arm, and for the first time in his life, Klaus lets someone else lead the way.

They don’t stay in London long. Caroline has lost people as well, over the years. Human friends who chose the wrong side. Supernatural students who were too young to understand what they were getting into. A husband whose name neither of them are ready to utter out loud, just yet. She’d chosen the British capitol as a place to mourn, licking her wounds in the rain while she waited.

She waited for him. The thought still takes his breath away.

“I’ve seen all the museums a hundred times already,” she explains, when Klaus finds her booking plane tickets, “you took your time getting here.”

“Apologies love.  
  
He doesn’t think he’ll ever get used to the way she flushes ever so slightly at the endearment. Vampires shouldn’t be able to blush, and yet Caroline Forbes finds a way.

“I have a list.” She says, turning back to the laptop, as if that settles it.

She has multiple lists, actually. A notebook full of them, and a tablet with a backup, packed tidily in her designer bag. She lets Klaus read over it one night, as they lay together in a hotel in Prague, the music of the city drifting in through the open windows, her hair spread in a golden tangle across his chest.

He adds a few spots, notes of his own, restaurants and museums he thinks she’ll enjoy. Names of long dead poets whose homes they’ll visit, where he can entertain her with stories of the parties and scandals each housed.

It’s a silent agreement, that they skip the cemeteries.

They wander through ancient gardens instead, dipping their toes in fountains and passing afternoons on picnic blankets in parks. Caroline sips sangria as Klaus fills books with sketches of her spread out at ease, face turned up to the sun.

Alaric is minding the school, a steady human guardian for however many students remain. Their girls attend classes, write letters thanking Caroline for the boxes of clothes and trinkets and books she collects in each city visit to send home.

Hope is travelling with Rebecca, sending postcards and text messages every few days. Klaus gets calls from various banks once in a while, alerting him to the incredible strain the two of them are putting on his credit cards.

When he tells Caroline all she does is laugh and ask when he’s going to take _her_ shopping.

So they find themselves in Paris.

If Klaus is being honest, he’d been saving it for last. As they make their way through the Monte Marte, sampling sugary pastries and smelling rich bouquets at the flower market, he can’t help but remember the girl he danced with years ago at a high school dance in Mystic Falls, the cheap plastic beads of her flapper costume pressed against his three piece suit as he pulled her just a tad too close.

He’d known then that he would take her here, one day. And for the first time since he put his brother in the ground, Klaus finds himself smiling as he walks alone down a half forgotten alleyway, Caroline still asleep in the plush suite they’d compelled at the Ritz.

The boutique is exactly as he remembers it, two tiny floors stacked on top of each other, the tidy workshop out back housing a very old man he remembers fondly as a young child who followed him with wide eyes the last time he visited in the nineteen twenties. They pick out a ring together, simple but exquisite, and Klaus pays double it’s value out of sentiment alone.

“I didn’t think vampires proposed,” Caroline says, curling into his chest when he pulls the ring from its velvet box that night.

They’re in bed, tangled amongst silk sheets with a thread count so high it even impresses Klaus. He’d taken her for dinner, a quiet candlelit place that he’d liked the last time he was here, nearly a century before. He’d thought about climbing to the top of the Eiffel tower, or wandering along the Seine, but then Caroline had kissed him in the moonlight after desert, and here they were.

He was warm. Fresh blood in his system, good food, good wine, a beautiful woman in his bed. That’s what he’d have told himself half a century ago, when his family lay in boxes and he’d yet to set eyes on the beautiful woman in question.

But then Caroline had settled against his chest, bottle of champagne in hand, and made a joke about “their thing”. And he’d realized he wasn’t just warm and sated. He was content. Safe. There was still family to protect, still enemies to hunt to the ends of the earth, kingdoms to conquer. And he would do all of that, he would. But for the first time in years of fighting and wandering and running, he knew he would wake up tomorrow morning unafraid.

So he’d reached over to the bedside table and found the ring.

“You’ve been married before,” he says, as the question hangs between them.

“Stefan wasn’t an ordinary vampire,” she whispers, and Klaus doesn’t need to see her face to know that her eyes are misting over. He’s not the only one with a hole in his heart.

He presses a kiss to her collarbone, waits for the moment to pass.

“You know,” he whispers against the pale skin of her shoulder when she’s come back, pushing her own grief down to the place they don’t speak of, “I don’t think I’ve ever been called ordinary before.”

She giggles, and Klaus takes the opportunity to roll over, pinning her beneath him, pressing kisses across her neck, burying his face in her hair like he can breath in her light and trap the warmth of it beneath his skin.

Her arms wrap around his shoulders easily, fingers tracing familiar patterns across his spine.

“You know how I feel,” she says, pulling away for a moment so she can look into his eyes “but I’m not ready to put on another white dress just yet.”

“So you’re not quite finished being chased.”

She laughs, and he feels the vibration deep in his chest as she winds her legs around his waist, pushing the sheets aside and pulling herself close.

“Ask me again in the morning,” is all she says.

Klaus kisses her, tastes the bittersweet smile on her lips, knowing what she’ll say when they wake. Knowing that he’ll propose a dozen times in a dozen different ways before she softens, knowing that he has centuries to play this game.

Knowing that and that one day, he’ll win.

For now, he’s in Paris with Caroline Forbes. And that’s enough.

 


End file.
